Seven Things We Learned Analyzing 515 Million Wordles

Millions of people play Wordle every day, and share, discuss and debate how they tried to win.

For the first time, we’ve analyzed how players performed in half a billion of those Wordle games over the past year and compared their results with the strategies that our WordleBot recommends.

Here are seven things we learned:

1. Of the top 30 starting words, ADIEU is the most popular but least efficient.

Many, many words have been written about the best opening word for Wordle. Answering this question was, in fact, one of the motivations behind WordleBot’s development. In its robot brain, a handful of words — SLATE, CRANE, TRACE — are given the bot’s seal of approval as leading to the solution in the fewest guesses on average.

But for human Wordle players, the most popular opening word by some margin is ADIEU, with AUDIO, another four-vowel word, not far behind.